


L'Ondine et le Croisé

by Donna_Immaculata, ElDiablito_SF



Series: The Fabulous Adventures in Immortality of the Vampire Aramis and the Man Who Named the Mountain, Volume II [1]
Category: DUMAS Alexandre - Works, Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas, d'Artagnan Romances (Three Musketeers Series) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blasphemy, Fractured Fairy Tale, Heartbreak, M/M, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 02:31:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4461962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donna_Immaculata/pseuds/Donna_Immaculata, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Greek tragedy continues as hubris is punished, a life is lost and sea gods show their human face and soul.</p>
            </blockquote>





	L'Ondine et le Croisé

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Marie_Michon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marie_Michon/gifts).



> The epic continues, oh faithful readers. Will the immortal lovers be reunited? We shall see.

**Physkos, 1444**

When the wind sweeps across the waters, it makes little ripples. It makes great waves in the sea, waves that push into lands. Waves that push against rivers. Where salt and sweet waters comingle, this is where the ondines are born. They listen to the stories the waters tell; it sings to them, one kind of song in the depths of the ocean, where the kraken swim, and a very different one in rivers, where the water carves a path through forest and gorge. The ondines grow up with the stories waters tell them; they speak the languages of water and the language of air. They resemble human in form, but to be granted a soul, they have to marry a mortal man.

Or so they say. This is of course nonsense. Mortal men like to think that they are the chosen ones among all of creation, and that their touch has mystical powers. In fact, there is no being on earth, mortal or immortal, that is _less_ magical than the human man.

The youth spread in the sand by my feet looked like a mortal man. His mortality was, in fact, indisputable. The sea had spat him out and tossed him on shore. It had tried to devour him, but the waves had shown mercy and permitted the body to reach land so that his remains could be buried in an earthy rather than a watery grave. My attendants shrieked and recoiled in horror at the sight of the lifeless limbs, the grey-green face and the huge gash in his skull, where crabs had already gathered for a feast. The body had become a hunting ground for seagulls, who came swooping down to feed on carcass and crabs alike.

I made a sign at the Ottoman page boy who appeared to be the least revolted member of my entourage. The seagulls rose with an almighty shriek. Sensing danger, some sentinel crabs turned their eyestalks in our direction; others raised their pincers. But several remained undeterred and continued to pick at the wound, shoving bits of flesh between their mandibles. My page stomped on them, crushing shells underfoot and sending the surviving creatures scurrying across the sand.

“We can’t leave the body here,” I said. “He has to be buried according to-” ‘Custom’, I had intended to say. Then I noticed the white surcoat with the red cross across the breast and realised that the corpse belonged to the Knights Hospitaller. I sighed. “He has to be returned to the Order of Saint John,” I said, with a glance across the sea, to where it had stood in flames on the north shores of Rhodes not long ago.

Crouching above the body, my page boy looked up at me, awaiting my commands. I dispatched him to fetch help. Once he was gone, I sank down by the young Crusader’s side. He could not have been dead long, his face was still intact. Not even his eyes – always the first casualty in the drowned – were missing. They were closed, and had it not been for the deep wound that almost split his skull in two, he might have been asleep.

To the shrieking horror of one or two of my attendants (for those girls affected to be squeamish whenever the occasion for demonstrating their fragility presented itself), I reached out and pushed his tangled locks back to look at his face. A pale brow, bluish temples and sharp cheekbones; the youth was not yet twenty years old. You might think that I lamented the loss of so young a life to the sea.

I did not. The waters take what is their due.

I pressed my palm to his cheek. The clammy face of human death and decay.

In the next moment, my hand jerked back as though burned. The skin was warm. Life was still trapped in the shell of flesh and bone. Was he breathing? I pulled a silver comb out of my hair and held it to his lips. Even as waves lapped at his legs and tugged at his robe, vapour misted on the polished surface.

The waves, it appeared, had not shown mercy after all. Rather than devouring his soul and his body, they had regurgitated him to die a slow death under the blazing sun.

***

Even though I was not an adherent of the Christian faith, I approved of the virtue of charity as prescribed by the Roman church. That was why the Crusader was now lying in a dim chamber in the house of my relations, where I tended to him myself. On the first day, we had him nursed by a hastily summoned physician, but the man had been felled by a sudden fever. Rather than help us nurse the drowned Crusader, he had to be put to bed himself, where he withered under our very eyes.

Unlike the Crusader. Young as he was, he had a strong constitution, for he continued to improve apace. Not even half a week passed, and the ghastly wound had closed, leaving a scar that his lush locks would soon conceal. The green tinge faded, even though his complexion remained the colour of the salt marshes in the Bretagne. 

On the third day, he opened his eyes.

I had been sitting by his side, moistening his fever-parched lips with a cloth soaked in an herbal essence prepared by my cousin’s own hand. I smelled kelp and dragonwort in the potion, which red beet juice had rendered the colour of a blood drop dissolving in water.

His eyes were black like the deepest abyss at the ground of the ocean, where the kraken dwells.

His lips moved. “ _Athos._ ” I had to lean in to catch the word, and I still wasn’t sure if I had heard it right. Could he truly wish to be carried to the Holy Mount? He was a Crusader. Asceticism and self-denial wasn’t part of his job description.

The next word he uttered was much more plausible. “ _Blood._ ” The dark eyes flickered, and I saw a gleam in their depths, like a flash of light emitted by a sea-dwelling creature. Crusaders. They revelled in the sacrament of blood-spill. I had seen them return from the Holy Land, flaunting the blades of their swords that had been baptised in the blood of Saracens.

The sea killed more gently than steel.

“You are injured, sir knight,” I told him, kindly, with my hand pressed to his cheek. “The bleeding is staunched. You are on the mend.”

His head rolled in the pillow and his mouth came to rest against my wrist. The lips parted, the tongue flicked out like a serpent’s.

The door swung open and I turned around. My cousin entered on silent feet. “The physician died,” Iris said. A frown creased her brow as she looked past me at the youth in the pillows. In the gloom his white face emitted a glow like a jellyfish. His eyes were open, no longer soft and misted over, but sharp like dagger points. Sharp like the teeth that had rested against my wrist not a minute ago.

“Leave us alone, cousin,” I asked of Iris. Her green-eyed gaze shifted from his face to mine, and she disappeared through the door as silently as she had come, like an ebbing wave pulled away by the force of the moon.

His ember eyes burned into my face. Yet, I wasn’t scared. I knew how to douse fires that sought to destroy.

“Who are you?” I asked quietly and watched his lips part, his tongue flick out to wet his lacerated lips.

“Aramis,” he whispered. Such a beautiful name. So suited to those delicate features, those fine bones. Silk and alabaster. The hand that had crafted him had used the finest materials that an artisan could wish for. He was beautiful. I had seen the beauty of death when I had first laid eyes on him that day on the beach. I now saw the beauty of life, throbbing through his veins with every pulse, ever stronger, like the incoming tide. My head spun, my lungs clenched, I found myself breathless. A tug, as if a clawed hand had reached into my breast and begun to squeeze my heart. I blinked and pulled back.

“Was that you?” I asked. “Don’t do that.”

“Forgive me!” He blurted out in a tone of such sincerity that I couldn’t but smile. He was like a boy caught with his hand in a jar of marzipan. “That was uncalled for, I wasn't thinking straight." Talking exhausted him and I lay my fingers across his lips to shush him. His breath alighted on my skin. "Forgive me," he whispered. "May I inquire... Who are you, my lady?”

Such beautiful manners. There was nothing about him that wasn’t beautiful. I wondered at the waters; wondered that they had not kept him, cradled him in their arms and lulled him to death.

“Marie.”

He smiled. “Marie,” he whispered. Or was it ‘mare’?

Had he guessed it yet?

“ _Filia maris_ ”. Oh, he was astute! His hand, white under the bruises and slim-fingered like a lady’s, closed around my wrist like a manacle. He carried my hand to his mouth and kissed the inside of my wrist. His voice full of insatiable longing, he whispered: “You’ve got the ocean in your blood.”

***

The first memory that I recall was the absence of darkness. It was not day, yet above my head a glowing mist dispersed the gloom. Air brushed my face like Persian gauze. The pressure that had pushed me into the depths of sea and death had lifted: I breathed again.

Had I been trapped under water? Or had I dreamed it? Had my memories of an earthy grave been replaced by nightmares of a watery grave? The herbal flavour that coated my lips could not conceal the taste of salt. Yet that didn’t mean anything, the salt of the sea had been ingrained on my tongue ever since I had come to Greece.

No. Much longer than that.

“ _Athos_ ,” I breathed and opened my eyes, willing his face to materialise before me. All I saw was light. A halo of gold. I narrowed my eyes against it as pain shot through my skull. For a moment, I panicked, I was blind again. My body was weak, my craving was strong, and I clawed around me in a desperate attempt to save myself from nothingness. _Blood_ , I croaked, for if he was there... No, if he was there, he would have long given it to me.

He wasn’t. The skin against my mouth was not his. The fragrance of rose water was not his. The golden hair. Eyes as blue as Aegean waves, whereas his were as dark as the depths of the forests of my Wallachian home.

I learned later that she had saved me when I lay dying on the beach. I wondered if I had truly died – if drowning and drying out in the sun like a prune would have been enough to kill me, or if I had returned from that new purgatory as well, like I had returned from hallowed earth. Perhaps sea life would have eaten me over time. It would take a greater man than me to come back from that.

Marie. She wasn’t scared, that was the most striking thing about her. She was beautiful and she was unafraid, and I wanted to worship her on my knees. But I was weak and I had to take the long path to getting better, because I had promised Marie that I would not harm any person belonging to the household.

“I won’t tell anyone that you killed the physician,” she told me, leaning over me so that I could almost feel the weight of her breasts on my chest. She was smiling a kittyish smile. “He was an incompetent pantaloon anyway. Can you imagine that he wanted to _bleed_ you?”

My hand twitched to the crook of my elbow. My entire body was in so much pain, I could not tell where I was injured and where merely bruised. Marie laughed and shook her head, and her hand alighted on mine.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t let him,” she laughed, curling her fingers around mine. “ _I’m_ not a pantaloon.”

She dropped the epithet so casually that it took my feverish brain a moment to catch up. “You speak the _langue_.”

“It is the language of my fathers,” she said.

“Do underwater folk converse in the tongue of Auvergne?”

She laughed again, and I realised how long it had been since I last heard a woman’s laugh. Not that I had _missed_ it, pleasantly occupied as I had been.

I gritted my teeth, pushed the thought aside and focused on the gold-and-silver creature that had sprawled by my side on the bed like a large and very purry cat.

“You’ve remembered, then,” she said, stroking my hair as casually as she talked to me, just as she did everything else. Nothing about her touch was hesitant; her gestures were bold and full of purpose. I assumed that she must have been present when my clothes and chainmail had been removed, because I couldn’t imagine her not to.

“You were delirious, I thought you might have forgotten,” she continued, and I pressed my face into the side of her breast and gave myself over to the sound of her voice. Now that I knew, I could hear the lilt that infused the Latin that she spoke with a tantalising melody. I wanted to hear more, and she told me.

She told me of a land so far in the West that there was nothing west of it but the stormy ocean. A land of salt marshes, vast swathes of forests, and granite cliffs. She told me of the river meandering through gorges, all the way to the sea where its waters merged with crested waves. There, in the tumbling back-and-forth of salt and sweet waters she had been born from the foaming surf. I had been right that she had the ocean in her blood. But I knew now that it was spiced with the sweetness of waters that had known forests and meadows.

“Did you give up your mermaid tail for the love of a mortal man?” I teased her.

Marie laughed. “Ah, what a ludicrous idea! But I don’t blame you, mon croisé démoniaque. This is what they tell you, the men who tell those tales. That’s because they’re men. They think the waters are full of nubile young nymphs, ready to give up their home to follow their new masters, even if that means death.”

“Does it? Mean death?” I closed my eyes, curled up against her side. I didn’t want to talk about death.

“Not as long as there’s water. Not as long as I go back to the waters that gave me life.”

She appeared to sense the tension that had squeezed itself into my muscles, for she put an arm around me and began to rub my shoulder with strong fingers. “They say I don’t have a soul and that the union with a mortal man will grant me one,” she continued, her tone sombre for once. “They say that without a soul, I will die. Whereas humans live forever, even after their demise, for they enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” She snorted. “I have lived centuries longer than any human man, and they have the impudence to claim that _they_ hold the key to immortality. And that the path thereto leads through their crotch.”

“I’ve got two souls,” I said. “You’re welcome to one.”

My days, as I lay recuperating, were neither tedious nor gloomy. The beautiful Ondine had appeared an angel, a messenger from gods, sent ashore to save my body from purgatory. When I had told her I thought her a gift from God, she laughed. “Micheau,” I said, jumbling Hebrew and Auvergnese together, bastardising the ancient ‘Mikha'el’, Michael, Who is like God, in an attempt to make her laugh again. “Michaud?” She did laugh, and told me that she was determined to work on my diction. “Michaux, perhaps?”

My nights were filled with mares that had nothing to do with the sea.

Weak as I was, I slept like a mortal. Sometimes I woke, because earth came crashing down on me, crushing my ribs until I couldn’t breathe. Sometimes I didn’t wake; sometimes I suffocated and my skin peeled back, leaving my bones exposed as if they had been picked clean by thousands of tiny mouths.

Sometimes I dreamt of stretching my claws, spreading my wings and, like Morpheus’ brothers, the Oneiroi in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of fluttering away like a giant bat. I don’t know where I flew, for those dreams remained empty and dark, as if my soul had reached a domain wherein it was struck with blindness.

I cherished the nothingness; the _nihil_ brought peace upon my fevered brain. Marie had offered, discreetly and charmingly, to let me drink her blood, but I refused. I had never violated a woman’s body like that, and I wasn’t going to start now. No, this was an act that I reserved for men who deserved my ire or vengeance. For men whom I ran through with my sword as much as I ran them through with my teeth.

 _And for_.

So suited for seeing in the dark, my eyes were sightless. So prone to bouts of fury and passion, my body was listless. Nothing roused me but my dreams of nothing. An insane mantra took hold, the staccato of a heart beating its last frantic beats, and my thoughts ran around in circles in the same way that my blood – my own, not replenished, never replenished – coursed through my body, round and round and round, and how could humans stand that? Boiling with bone-melting fever, I felt my blood run stagnant in my veins. And the beat of my pulse died away, while I faded away into nothing, driven away to do penance, as revealed by the fires of perdition. I was lonely and stranded. Looking for him, I saw nothing, as I cried out his name in horror: “Athos!” Athos cried out my name in horror: “Aramis!" – looking for me, he saw nothing. He was lonely and stranded, as revealed by the fires of perdition. Driven away to do penance. While he faded away into nothing, and the beat of his pulse died away, I felt my blood run stagnant in my veins, boiling with bone-melting fever.

Round and round in my head, and oh how I craved the darkness or my earthy mares. Do you want to know why I wasn’t going frantic, trapped as I was? Why I didn’t attempt to move Heaven, Earth and Sea to find him?

Because I didn’t feel him. I could always find him. Always. I sensed him ever since I had first followed the silver thread through the camp to the tent where he slept.

Atropos had cut the silver thread. For the first time in five decades, I didn’t know where Athos was.

***

_Only those who know yearning_  
_Know what sorrows me!_  
_Deserted and divided_  
_From all joy,_  
_I watch the firmament_  
_From yonder side._

_Ah! the one who loves and knows me_  
_Is in the vast unknown._  
_It dizzies me, it burns_  
_my guts._  
_Only those who know yearning_  
_Know how I suffer!_

He had a charming hand, the letters small and almost feminine. Parchment, quill and ink were the first items for which he asked when his wounds had closed and the bruises on his hands had faded. To write a letter to his _Langue_ on Rhodes, had been the reason he had given. My Crusader was a poet at heart, it seemed. I held in my hand the parchment that I had found among his papers, smiling as I read the verses. Not only his body was that of a young man, his heart was too – regardless of the years he’d roamed this Earth.

His body was stronger than it looked. Having found his room deserted, I had searched him by the shore and spotted him immersed hip-dip in the waves, looking out across the sea. To where Rhodes lay. My attendant spread a blanket out for me and retired, and I reclined in the shade, watching Aramis rise from the surf like an alabaster statue. Sunbeams caught in water droplets and made his skin dazzle. This was the first time since the day I’d found him on the beach and had him stripped that I saw him without his clothes. His face was so thin it led one to assume his body must be as well. Yet when they stood bare, I saw the broadness of his shoulders and the power coiled in the lean muscle cords of his arms. Part of me wanted him to turn around and smile at me.

Part of me wanted him to start walking without turning around, and to keep walking, until the blue fingers of Poseidon’s daughters would close around him and pull him down to rest on their father’s chest for all eternity.

I had not lied to Aramis when I told him that the waters of my birth became the waters of my rebirth. What I had not told him was the caveat attached to every renewed lease of my life: the price was the life of another.

The family whose child I had been for more decades than I cared to remember were descendants of the kings of Bretagne. Rulers over a tongue of land thrust into the maws of the ocean, harried by their ferocious neighbours wind and water. They made a pact. Like all noble families of their time, the House of Rohan knew about the unbreakable bond of blood ties. They could not fight wind and water, but they could protect their borders by making the elements their allies. For centuries, a child of the waters had been coming to live as a son or daughter of Rohan, while a child of Rohan was handed over to the waves. I was born and reborn from the foaming waters of the Loire delta, which became the home and resting place of human children born into the House of Rohan.

I was far away from home, yet as I watched waves lap at Aramis’ hips, a thought manifested itself: what would happen, I wondered, if a revenant was handed over to my aquatic brothers and sisters? Could I prolong my lifespan as a human by giving a _renatus_ to my underwater family?

Aramis turned around. He spotted me among the green shadows, and he began to walk towards me – the slow, measured strides of mortal and immortal men alike who found themselves amidst sweeping and cresting waves. It was the feline grace of a wildcat that carried him out of the surf and towards me. Only briefly did he stop in his steps: when he saw my gaze drop. When I raised my eyes to his, we both smiled.

His teeth flashed like white corals, and just as sharp. Light got swallowed in the fathomless depths of his eyes as if in an underwater cavern. His body glistened, its lines firm and supple at the same time, and his shadow fell on the blanket upon which I was sitting when he came to stand before me.

“I was looking for you, sir knight.” I spoke first, watching water droplets drip from his hair, leave shiny trails in the grooves of his skin and raise goosebumps between the fine hairs on his arms and stomach.

“You’ve found me, Madame.” He bowed with a hand pressed to his chest, and I hid my smile behind my fan. “How can I be of service to you? Command me.”

His manners were as beautiful as his nudity, and I told him so. He reached for his discarded tunic, but I was faster. “Not on my account, chevalier,” I told him, crumpling the fabric in my fist. “Unless you insist.”

“Ah!” He sank down on his knees by my side, took my hand and carried it to his lips. “Is this how you wish me to be of service?”

He looked young. Much younger than me, for my human body aged at a human pace. “Only if it is your wish likewise,” I told him, cupping his face with one hand. He nestled his cheek in my palm, his half-lidded eyes glittering like a cat’s.

The hesitation was barely perceptible, but I felt it in the way his skin tautened under my touch. Despite the lighthearted charm he flaunted as shamelessly as his dishabille, there was deep melancholy to his aspect. I never doubted that he desired me, and yet his coquetry was born out of politeness rather than passion.

I handed him his tunic and watched him slip it over his head, and then I pulled him in my arms. He lay against me like he had done at night. Did he remember? When I had looked in on him, he had been deeply asleep, white and still like a dead man. I had felt for his breath. I had held his hand in mine, stroking the bruised knuckles with my fingertips. I had been lulled into slumber by his side, wondering where his soul had flown to, for it didn’t appear to dwell in his body while he was in repose.

The white fabric of his tunic stuck to his wet skin, and I traced the patches with my fingers. Aramis lay quite still, and his soul appeared to go a-wandering again.

“Have you written the letter to your Grand maître?”

“I have.”

“And… to your friend?”

It was not quite the stab in the dark as it might have seemed. I had found his poem. I had read it. Now, I waited patiently for him to speak.

“Not yet,” he breathed eventually. How could a man so old be so young at the same time? The urge to counsel him grew ever stronger.

“Once you do,” I weighed my words carefully, “you will be able to send your epistles by the fastest, most reliable messenger. My cousin – she will carry it for you.”

“Does she have a fast boat?”

“Better than that.” I raised myself on my elbow and threaded my fingers through his hair. Aramis was looking up at me with an expression that was almost pleading. I leaned over him and kissed his black eyes. “She has wings.”

***

Aramis’ mortal name, with which he signed his letter to his Grand maître, was René d’Herblay, which amused me greatly.

“ _Renatus_?” I slapped his arm with my fan. “Don’t you think this makes it rather too obvious, chevalier?”

He bowed. “I find that hiding in plain sight is the most effective strategy. As long as you tell people who you are, they don’t believe it. I know someone who-” He bit his lip and his gaze strayed to the window, behind which billowed the waves of the Aegean.

“Your friend,” I said. “You don’t know if he’s alive.”

“No.” He forced his mouth into a smile. “I know he’s not dead. He… doesn’t die.”

“Is he a revenant, too?”

“He’s a god,” Aramis said curtly and turned away from me.

I thought of the red cross that my Crusader had worn on his chest when I first saw him and bit my tongue. For a man who was ostensibly dedicated to spreading the word and fame of the Christian god among the peoples of this Earth, he consorted rather enthusiastically with pagan deities. (For I could not imagine that the god Aramis referred to was the god of the Israelites. The idea that the bearded patriarch had left his desert home to cavort on Hellenic shores was ludicrous.)

“Is he on Rhodes?” I asked, even though I guessed the answer.

“I-” Something was burning deep in Aramis’ eyes, and his knuckles had gone white, despite the fact that he was keeping himself from clenching his hands into fists. “I don’t know.”

“You shall find out!” I said cheerfully, picked up the parchment, which he had not yet folded, and upon which two words were written: _Athos_ and _Physkos_. The holy mountain had a deep significance for him, for it had been the first word he had spoken when he woke from his deathlike state. “Is that all?” I asked.

“Yes.” He took the parchment from my hand, folded it fancifully, took up the quill again and wrote: _Armand de Sillègue - Langue d’Auvergne_.

Two more letters were already written and sealed, one addressed to the Grand Master of the Langue d’Auvergne, the other to Isaac de Portaut of the same division.

“Now, Madame,” Aramis said, his face a white mask behind which his black eyes burned like coals. “If you would oblige me and bring me to your cousin, my friendship and gratitude would be yours until the day I die.”

I call Iris my cousin, for the human language does not have a word to describe our kinship. We are both daughters of water, but whereas I had been born from the element itself, Iris had been conceived by the nymph of the clouds and the god of the sea. Yet Iris lived in exile on land, for she had no reason to love the sea god Poseidon: it was he who, in time-honoured tradition of the Olympians, had overthrown her father Thaumas and assumed his place on the ocean’s throne. Still, her heritage made Iris a goddess of sea and sky. Travelling with the speed of wind from one end of the world to the next, she carried messages between gods and humans.

Asking Iris to play the go-between for Aramis and his Olympian friend had been my plan all along. Yet when I entered her chamber, I walked in on a startling tableau. Aramis, who had followed me soundlessly like a cat, stopped and I felt him turn to a statue. Iris was extricating herself from the arms of her husband, who smiled at me over her shoulder. His gaze trailed to Aramis and I saw his smile change – a sharp gust of wind swirling through a refreshing breeze.

“Zephyrus,” I said, my curiosity piqued by this astonishing reaction. “How delightful to see you, cousin. Permit me,” I took Aramis’ hand in mine and led him towards the West Wind, “to introduce my dear friend Aramis to you.”

“The pleasure is all mine, cousin,” Zephyrus said, eyes glued to Aramis’ face.

I shot a quick glance at my Crusader, whom I had never yet seen more feline. The black eyes gleamed and I was sure that if he opened his mouth, fangs would flash like daggers. Had the wind torn him and his friend apart? Zephyrus was still smiling at Aramis, his eyes alight with a fever of such brilliance as one would expect from Notos, the deceptively soft and warm bringer of autumn storms, of from Boreas, the icy wind of the North, but not from the mild west wind, whose playful breeze was the harbinger of spring.

“I’m afraid the pleasure will be of short duration,” I said quickly, before either man could speak. “I shall send you on a quest, cousin.”

Zephyrus tore his gaze away from Aramis. “Anything for you, my dear sister,” he said.

I handed him Aramis’ letters and felt my Crusader palpitate with indignation, but I ignored his anger. “Fly to Rhodes, beloved Anemoi brother,” I said in the ancient language of the Gods. “Deliver these epistles to the men in whose hands they belong. And as you return, fill the sails of their boat with your gentle breath and carry them swiftly to these shores.”

***

_Kisses of my Anemoi lover._

_Kisses bestowed on my face by my Anemoi lover._

Athos’ own words, spoken a year ago when he had found me watching the sunset from the ramparts of the citadel as the soft west wind caressed my hair and skin with his ghosting breath.

_My Hyacinthus._

I clenched my teeth until my jaws hurt and rammed my nails into the palms of my hands until I felt blood. His _Hyacinthus_. I’d never liked the moniker, but now that I’d met the man – the _wind_ – whose jealous desire had led to Hyacinthus’ death, I loathed it.

The way Zephyrus had looked at me. The way he smiled. As if he _knew_.

How vulnerable was his human vessel? Would his blood be as rich as Athos’, or were his veins empty with the insubstantial essence of air? But no. I had promised Marie not to harm anyone who belonged to the household. My honour as a gentleman was at stake.

I bent over the stone basin and scrubbed my face in cold water. I washed off the ghosts of the kisses that he had left on my skin without my assent. “Oh, Athos,” I whispered, staring at my own reflection in water and willing it to change into his. “Why did you bring me here?”

Why did you leave me here?

No. He had not left me. Athos would not leave me. Unless he was dead. Yet I knew that he was not, for that was the one thing, the _Fact_ around which my entire existence revolved: Athos would never die.

And if he had died, I whispered soundlessly, as I would whisper a prayer, if he had died, I knew what I had to do: I would travel to Olympus, I would enter his Father’s home, and I would burn a sacrificial cake on the altar. I would propitiate the Goddess of the Hearth like she had never been propitiated in her immortal life.

Porthos would help. I faltered and frowned. Would Porthos be welcome on Olympus? He, the son of a Titan? No, his solar Father had never engaged in Titanomachy, Porthos would be safe. It did not occur to me to wonder if Porthos lived, for he was the true immortal amongst us. It did not occur to me to wonder if he would be willing to follow me to Olympus. His friendship, like Athos’ love, was _Fact_.

It was this Fact that gave me strength when the boat from Rhodes arrived the next day, pushed to the shore by the West Wind who blew from the south. The white glare of sails against the midday sun. The creaking of masts. The Titan at the helm. The heat of the sun as I disappeared in his embrace. The blood pumping in my temples. The darkness – not the peaceful _nihil_ : the frightful organic darkness that clawed its way through my mind.

“He’s not with you?” Porthos rumbled somewhere above my head.

“He’s gone.” I disentangled myself from his embrace and stood shivering in the sun.

“Can’t be,” Porthos said. “He’s immortal. He’s probably trapped somewhere.” We both glanced at the waves that lapped at the sand beneath our feet like frisky puppies. Oh, the sea knew well how to hide her murderous heart by assuming a harmless appearance. “We should ask his Uncle Poseidon if he’s heard something. Can he go underwater?” He nodded his head at Zephyrus who, in his human form, frolicked in the surf with his wife.

“He can’t,” I said. “But-” My eyes alighted on Marie, who watched my reunion with Porthos from the shadows. “A messenger can be despatched.”

You may think that an eternity had passed since the battle against the Egyptians, but it had been barely a week. The physician who had been fetched to restore my health had performed admirably, for though he had attempted to bleed me, it had been the other way round. Yet I was still weak, and my spirits were low. I hadn’t dared ask Marie to inquire with her underwater kinfolk if his body was floating in their kingdom. For I knew that even if they didn’t kill, the waters liked to keep.

Porthos’ arrival had lent me new hope, and Marie’s help was quickly engaged. A message was despatched, a message was received, a numbness descended upon my soul. The waters, it turned out, had retained him. Wherefore, I did not know. For how long, I was not told. All that I knew was that I was tethered to these shores as long as he was adrift in the fathomless depths. Time meant nothing to me. I would outwait the sea.

When we were saying goodnight, Marie pressed a chaste kiss to my lips. Our eyes met, and what I read in hers sparked my numb soul to life. I lay awake, gazing into darkness, until Selene’s face peeped in through the window in my bedchamber. Then, I got up, I left Porthos asleep and a-snore, and I glided to Marie’s room, guided not by sight but by sense.

“To-morrow, we will part,” she said, once I had reached her bed. Her golden head was propped up on her folded arm, and with her other hand she toyed with a locket that lay on her chest.

“Forever?” I slid above her, and her hand alighted on the nape of my neck.

“No.” Marie kissed me and I fell. I sank deeper and deeper, drowning myself in ferocious passion like I drowned myself in the darkness of _nihil_.

***

**The Seven Seas, 16th century**

What can I tell you about the decades that followed? Homer could have sung many epics about my exploits after I had thrown myself at the mercy of the waters that I loathed and saw my fate tossed around by the waves that rendered me dizzy. Odysseus’ voyages had lasted but ten years; mine lasted ten times as long before I lost count.

Porthos, good, honest, faithful Porthos never left my side – except when a pretty wife, wench or widow winked at him and he snuck away like a guard dog that had smelled a bitch. But, like the faithful guard dog, he always returned to me and we never were apart for long. Once, on an eastbound voyage that took us all the way to Cathay, I drank his blood, cowering by his side and slurping at his wrist like a suckling pig.

We never strayed away for long from Rhodes and the Order of Saint John, for it was the Aegean Sea that would return Athos to the land of the living one day. Yet after a few decades even the dullest-witted Knight Hospitaller would notice that we did not age. Up to a point, I could bedevil humans to believe me older than I appeared. But that handy trick could not explain my long lifespan, and it worked best on people who _wanted_ to believe that my looks and health were failing me: my enemies, in short, whose own lifespan tended not to be long. And so it came that every few decades Porthos and I left, wandered, returned, and presented ourselves to the Hospitallers again.

After Rhodes had fallen into the hands of the Ottomans, the Order moved its headquarters and we became Knights of Malta. Nothing changed, except that I now wrote my letters to Marie from Città Rohan, the Maltese town founded by the House of Rohan and bearing its coat of arms. She was amused, my beautiful Ondine, and rushed gladly to visit me (for unlike myself, Marie knew how to travel by sea without suffering from ennui and mal de mer). She asked me, as I knelt between her thighs, to come and live with her in Tours. “How long has it been?” she asked softly, burying her hand in my hair. “Sometimes, the sea does not return what she took.”

Her words jolted through me. For another decade had passed in which I had not thought of Athos. He was gone longer than he and I had ever been together. I wondered if my love for him was but a memory that I kept a-glimmer: the eternal flame before the tabernacle, which gives neither heat nor light and is only kept alive to honour a god who returned from the dead once and never returned again. Why did I still feel anchored to this spot of land amidst the waves and waters if I neither hoped nor waited for his rebirth any longer?

One morning, I opened my eyes and waited for the dream images to fade into the deepest and darkest crevices of my mind, whence they had sprung. I looked up into the blazing light and I knew: The waves had tossed me ashore. The meandering path of my life would lead me to France.


End file.
